


People Will Always Need Coal

by QSoC



Series: Hills of Gold [3]
Category: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 04:03:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11501397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QSoC/pseuds/QSoC
Summary: 57 million tons of coal was produced in Wales in 1913.In 1984, it wasn't.





	People Will Always Need Coal

He'd seen faces like it before. Pale, gaunt, defeated. Whole towns of children without winter gloves, where dinner on the table was a hope, not a guarantee. His own town dying from the inside out. His own niece and nephew gone quiet with fear and worry.

Megan called him coward. Gareth a no-good layabout with no idea what a real day's work was all about. He knew it was just the tension rising.

(He also knew it was true.)

It wasn't his fault that he discovered the routes to other worlds the same time his own was collapsing. In all all honesty, he thought he may have found the solution. If his magic - just stories and legends back in Wales - actually worked here, maybe he could bring it back. Fix the problems. He couldn't help that finding this out meant staying away. It wasn't safe to keep making the journey back - he wasn't quite sure how it all worked in the first place.

(This is what he told himself, each night in Mrs. Penstemmon's attic room without a "nos da!" from Mari. It was safer for him to stay. It was too risky to go back.)

But he learnt and he grew stronger. He chased solutions that were always out of reach. People were always harder to fix than problems. Governments harder to fix than people.

(A single smile and he'd never leave.)

He had never been part of that world anyway, not really. It was dark underground, and dirty, and cold, and his nerves weren't strong enough to never see the sun. He could fly up the wings, sing folk songs till he was hoarse, but you could never pay him enough to go down the pits.

(Megan said he was selfish, his father a disgrace. The veins of the earth warmed the blood in his heart, but he was more than the coal that built him. Fire is light, and warmth, and smoke, that flees upwards and reaches the stars. He didn't turn his back on the valleys. They were the fuel that powered his flight.)

He graduated, in a way, set up his own shop by the sea. It reminded him of better times, before the strikes, before the winter. When small pale children came knocking at his door, he remembered his nephew. There's a rot in the crops, the boat sprung a leak. Dad has nothing to sell at market, you're the only one who can help.

He gave them everything, he gave them it all. He couldn't help there, but he could do his best here. 

(Coal was a luxury in Ingary, reserved only for the nobles up in Kingsbury. He grew used to woodsmoke at his hearth, stared at the light and remembered a different fuel, a different warmth.)

He found a spell in January. Fixed the door in March. It had been months, but he knew what to do.

(Help doesn't just mean changing the world.)

Megan shouted, Gareth stared. The children watched and cried and Howell sat and broke and hurt all over. He'd been there, he cracked, if they needed him.

They did, she snapped, just not in the way that he thought.

(Wood burns differently to coal. It cracks and pops with moisture and life, with ash that feeds and nourishes and gives again. Coal is hard, and ancient, and formed under pressure and heat. It's messy and harsh, but pure and steady. It glows the longest, the warmest.)

He met a fire that needed his heart to burn.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Title is from the Public Service Broadcasting song that inspired this. And by inspired, I mean I listened to the song for two weeks on repeat and somewhere in that time started writing this - but only realised the connection once it was finished.
> 
> \- Since then and now, the whole album - Every Valley - has been released. I highly, highly recommend it. 
> 
> \- I'm not Welsh, and was born almost a decade after the strikes finished. All my knowledge comes from Pride, Billy Bragg, and Wikipedia (and a little from friends' families in NE England/Midlands).
> 
> \- Unbeta'd


End file.
